Tomorrow is TalkTV’s first birthday, so as News UK prepare to celebrate, Guido’s taking a look at how things are playing out. First, their leading man: as we reported last week, Piers Morgan is now broadcasting from the baby Shard in a smaller, cheaper studio. The fancy Ealing setup – which was allegedly selected to cut Piers’ commute – has been scrapped to save money. The channel lost £34 million last year, in large part thanks to the size of Morgan’s over-inflated pay packet.
As for viewership, co-conspirators will notice Guido no longer publishes regular updates on the BARB figures. Since TalkTV is turning one, Guido’s doing it again for old time’s sake. The broad picture is that GB News consistently beats TalkTV throughout the day, including prime time. A big problem for Piers Morgan in the last six weeks is his new competitor, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Rees-Mogg airs on GB News in the same 8pm slot, and in the last 30 days, has recorded double Morgan’s viewership on six separate occasions. Last Thursday, Piers Morgan Unwatched got 26,700 viewers, while Jacob took in 51,300. In fact, Piers even lost to Jeremy Kyle on 28,000. Piers used to blame Tom Newton Dunn’s “No Views Desk” for tanking the viewership as Unwatched was about to air. Now Kyle is his warm-up man, and the viewership is… the same.
Guido knows this will be tough for Piers to read. Apparently he’s hasn’t taken kindly to our reports, and is known to fume about them to underlings. After a decade of retweeting and engaging he unfollowed Guido on Twitter a few months ago, although he’s had the self-discipline not to block us yet. If there’s one thing Piers hates, it’s being irrelevant. If there’s one thing he likes, however, it’s his YouTube channel, which to be fair to Piers, recently crossed 1 million subscribers – and his headline interviews with the likes of Stormy Daniels get lots of clicks. Unfortunately, as TalkTV insiders point out, “YouTube hits don’t pay the bills”…
For those wondering how Tom Newton Dunn is doing ever since he achieved net zero in February, his last show got about 6,500 viewers. When he was put out to pasture with the 10 pm slot, his show rebranded to “First Edition“. Amongst TalkTV staff, however, Guido hears it goes by another name: “Last Chance Saloon”.
